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What the Argument from Evil Should, but Cannot, Be

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What the Argument from Evil Should, but Cannot, Be Edinburgh Research Explorer What the argument from evil should, but cannot, be Citation for published version: Collin, J 2018, 'What the argument from evil should, but cannot, be', Religious Studies, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412518000598 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1017/S0034412518000598 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Religious Studies General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 . What The Argument From Evil Should, But Cannot, Be Author information removed Affiliation information removed Michael Tooley has developed important and sophisticated evidential versions of the argument from evil that aim to circumvent sceptical theist responses. Evidential arguments from evil de- pend on the plausibility of inductive inferences from premises about our inability to see morally sufficient reasons for God to permit evils to conclusions about there being no morally sufficient reasons for God to permit evils. Tooley’s defence of this inductive step depends on the idea that the existence of unknown rightmaking properties is no more likely, a priori, than the existence of unknown wrongmaking properties. I argue that Tooley’s arguments beg the question against the theist, and, in doing so, commit an analogue of the base rate fallacy. I conclude with some reflections on what a successful argument from evil would have to establish. The Problem of Evil Many people have the intuition that the existence of God is incompatible with the exis- tence of evil, or with the existence of particular appalling evils, or that the existence of evil or particular appalling evils make it very unlikely that God exists. However, con- verting this intuition – one which, after all, isn’t shared by all or even most people – into a successful argument against the existence of God has proven difficult. Few now hold that there are convincing deductive arguments from premises about the nature of God and uncontroversial premises about the existence of evil which show that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil.1 Instead, a variety of evidential arguments from evil have been proposed. Undergirding evidential argu- ments from evil is the idea that the existence of evil (or terrible evil, or some particular evils) show that theism is unlikely, and hence defeats entitlement to theism.2 1See Mackie (1955) for a classic statement of this kind of argument. 2See (e.g.) (Rowe 1979; 1991; 1996; 1998) for classic statements of inductive arguments from evil, Draper (1989) for a Bayesian formulation, and Tooley (2015) for some recent objections to these. 1 2 Michael Tooley (Plantinga and Tooley (2008), Tooley (2012)) has developed a so- phisticated and rigorous evidential argument from evil, immune to objections often levelled against other arguments from evil. This makes understanding the argument a particularly important task. Despite this, it has so far received relatively little atten- tion in the literature.3 Tooley’s own argument is concrete, inductive and deontological. That is to say, it argues from particular actual evils rather than the presence of evil (of a kind of evil, or an amount of evil) more generally; it argues that the existence of God is improbable given these evils, and not that it is logically incompatible with these evils; and it focusses on the rightness of wrongness of acts rather than on the goodness or badness of states of affairs. In fact, Tooley gives two arguments. The first takes a single concrete evil – the Lisbon Earthquake – and argues that it is more likely than not that God did not exist at the start of the Lisbon Earthquake. The second makes a cumulative case from many concrete evils, and argues that the existence of God is very unlikely indeed. I’ll be focussing on Tooley’s stronger, second argument (though what I say applies, in slightly modified form, to the first) but it will be useful to look briefly at the first to get a sense of his general strategy. Tooley’s arguments, I will argue, beg the question against the theist, and so, even if sound, cannot provide warrant for the conclusion that God does not exist. Tooley’s First Argument Before we can get a grip on Tooley’s arguments, we will need to set out some of his terminology. Key here is the idea of rightmaking and wrongmaking properties. An action which has only rightmaking properties is morally permissible or obligatory, and an action which has only wrongmaking properties is morally impermissible. An action can possess wrongmaking properties, but still be morally right (permissible or obligatory) overall, so long as its rightmaking properties outweigh its wrongmaking properties. Similarly, an action can possess rightmaking properties but still be morally wrong (impermissible) overall, so long as its wrongmaking properties outweigh its rightmaking properties. To account for this, rightmaking and wrongmaking prop- erties, as Tooley understands them, are also quantitative ‘so that there are numbers associated with rightmaking and wrongmaking properties that represent the moral weight, or seriousness, of the properties in question.’ (Plantinga and Tooley (2008, 116)) Tooley takes this to be necessary if acts with both rightmaking and wrongmak- ing properties are to have a determinate moral status.4 The next step is to note that, for 3See Alvin Plantinga’s contribution to Plantinga and Tooley (2008), Otte (2013), and Langtry (2015) for discussion of the argument. 4This isn’t quite right. It could be the case that some moral reasons can trump others without it being the case that they have numerically describable values which can be added to one another. Moral reasoning could be nonmonotonic without being quantitative. In which case, actions could have both 3 any act, we can subdivide right- and wrongmaking properties of that act into those of which we have knowledge and those of which we do not. An action then is prima facie wrong ‘if the weight of its known wongmaking properties, taken together, is greater than the weight of its known rightmaking properties, taken together.’ (Plantinga and Tooley (2008, 116)) Tooley treats permitting events to occur, that are within one’s power to prevent, as an action. The action of allowing the Lisbon earthquake to occur has the wrongmaking property of allowing more than 50,000 ordinary people to be killed. Keeping these points in mind, we can set out Tooley’s first argument.5 Tooley wants to justify the inductive step from p to q: p: The action of intentionally allowing the Lisbon earthquake to occur has a wrongmaking property that we know of, and there are no rightmaking properties known to be counterbalancing. q: The total wrongmaking properties of the action of intentionally al- lowing the Lisbon earthquake to occur outweigh the total rightmaking properties of that action—including rightmaking properties of which we have no knowledge. Tooley then provides his attempted justification of this step. Central to Tooley’s justification is a symmetry principle with respect to unknown rightmaking and wrong- making properties: Given what we know about rightmaking and wrongmaking properties in themselves, for any two numbers, M and N, the probability of there being an unknown rightmaking property with a moral weight between M and N is equal to the probability of there being an unknown wrongmaking property with a (negative) moral weight whose absolute value is between M and N. (Plantinga and Tooley (2008, 129)) In other words, there may be unknown rightmaking properties that attach to acts that are prima facie wrong, but it is just as likely that there are unknown wrongmaking properties that attach to these acts, and, moreover, these rightmaking properties are not more likely to be weightier than these wrongmaking properties (or vice versa). rightmaking and wrongmaking properties, whilst still being determinately right, or wrong, even if right- making and wrongmaking properties are not quantitative. Langtry (2015) makes the point that some wrongmaking properties could be defeated by properties which were not themselves rightmaking prop- erties. I will ignore these complications; my objection here does not depend on whether Tooley’s argu- ment could be reformulated to take account of them. 5In fact, Tooley’s first argument is set out in more than twenty steps. What I provide here is a sketch, though one that keeps the main joints of the argument clearly in view. 4 Unknown deontological properties need not pull in the theist’s favour, and are just as likely to pull away from it. This is a crucial step in providing a rejoinder to the scep- tical theist. Sceptical theists argue that our cognitive limitations are such that we are not in a position to rule out (in Tooley’s terminology) unknown rightmaking proper- ties for events that it would be prima facie wrong to permit – rightmaking properties sufficiently weighty to make to make the event overall right to permit.6 For instance, though permitting the Lisbon earthquake had the wrongmaking property of allowing over 50,000 ordinary people to be killed, perhaps there are unknown countervailing rightmaking properties attached to permitting the Lisbon earthquake, which would outweigh this and other known wrongmaking properties.
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